“Incredible! You met the Rain God?”
“If it’s the same guy. I told him to stop complaining and show someone his book.”
There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson’s end of the phone.
“Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by you. Listen, do you know how much a tour operator is paying that guy not to go to Malaga this year? I mean forget irrigating the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding places for money. The man’s turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to make him win the bingo.
“Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man Who Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?”
“A nice one, but…”
“We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that’ll be OK. Where are you?”
“Er, I’m in Islington. Listen, Murray…”
“Islington!”
“Yes…”
“Well, what about the real weirdness of the week, the real seriously loopy stuff. You know anything about these flying people?”
“No.”
“You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy one. This is the real meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the time to say there’s this couple who go flying nights. We’ve got guys down in our photo labs working through the night to put together a genuine photograph. You must have heard.”
“No.”
“Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote. But that was months ago. Listen, it’s night after night this week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple just fly around the sky and start doing all kinds of stuff. And I don’t mean looking through walls or pretending to be box girder bridges. You don’t know anything?”
“No.”
“Arthur, it’s been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with you, chumbum, but I have to go. I’ll send the guy with the camera and the hose. Give me the address, I’m ready and writing.”
“Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something.”
“I have a lot to do.”
“I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins.”
“No story. Last year’s news. Forget ’em. They’re gone.”
“It’s important.”
“Listen, no one will touch it. You can’t sustain a story, you know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever the story’s about. Not our territory anyway, try the Sundays. Maybe they’ll run a little ‘Whatever Happened to “Whatever Happened to the Dolphins”’ story in a couple of years, around August. But what’s anybody going to do now? ‘Dolphins still gone’? ‘Continuing Dolphin Absence’? ‘Dolphins – Further Days Without Them’? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its little feet in the air and presently goes to the great golden spike in the sky, my old fruitbat.”
“Murray, I’m not interested in whether it’s a story. I just want to find out how I can get in touch with that guy in California who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know.”
Chapter 28
“People are beginning to talk,” said Fenchurch that evening, after they had hauled her ’cello in.
“Not only talk,” said Arthur, “but print, in big bold letters under the bingo prizes. Which is why I thought I’d better get these.”
He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.
“Arthur!” she said, hugging him. “Does that mean you managed to talk to him?”
“I have had a day,” said Arthur, “of extreme telephonic exhaustion. I have spoken to virtually every department of virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked his number down.”
“You’ve obviously been working hard, you’re drenched with sweat poor darling.”
“Not with sweat,” said Arthur wearily. “A photographer’s just been. I tried to argue, but – never mind, the point is, yes.”
“You spoke to him.”
“I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to come to the phone right now and could I call back.”
He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something and went to the fridge to find it.
“Want a drink?”
“Would commit murder to get one. I always know I’m in for a tough time when my ’cello teacher looks me up and down and says, ‘Ah yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.’.”
“I called again,” said Arthur, “and she said that he was 3.2 light years from the phone and I should call back.”
“Ah.”
“I called again. She said the situation had improved. He was now a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way to shout.”
“You don’t suppose,” said Fenchurch, doubtfully, “that there’s anyone else we can talk to?”
“It gets worse,” said Arthur, “I spoke to someone on a science magazine who actually knows him, and he said that John Watson will not only believe, but will actually have absolute proof, often dictated to him by angels with golden beards and green wings and Doctor Scholl footwear, that the month’s most fashionable silly theory is true. For people who question the validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the clogs in question, and that’s as far as you get.”
“I didn’t realize it was that bad,” said Fenchurch quietly. She fiddled listlessly with the tickets.
“I phoned Mrs. Watson again,” said Arthur. “Her name, by the way, and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill.”
“I see.”
“I’m glad you see. I thought you mightn’t believe any of this, so when I called her this time I used the telephone answering machine to record the call.”
He went across to the telephone machine and fiddled and fumed with all its buttons for a while, because it was the one which was particularly recommended by Which? magazine and is almost impossible to use without going mad.
“Here it is,” he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.
The voice was thin and crackly with its journey to a geostationary satellite and back, but it was also hauntingly calm.
“Perhaps I should explain,” Arcane Jill Watson’s voice said, “that the phone is in fact in a room that he never comes into. It’s in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter the Asylum and so he does not. I feel you should know this because it may save you phoning. If you would like to meet him, this is very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He will only meet people outside the Asylum.”
Arthur’s voice, at its most mystified: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Where is the asylum?”
“Where is the Asylum?” Arcane Jill Watson again. “Have you ever read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?”
On the tape, Arthur’s voice had to admit that he had not.
“You may want to do that. You may find that it clarifies things for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the Asylum is. Thank you.”
The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the machine off.
“Well, I suppose we can regard that as an invitation,” he said with a shrug. “I actually managed to get the address from the guy on the science magazine.”
Fenchurch looked up at him again with a thoughtful frown, and looked at the tickets again.
“Do you think it’s worth it?” she said.
“Well,” said Arthur, “the one thing that everyone I spoke to agrees on, apart from the fact that they all thought he was barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living about dolphins.”